A group of students from McGill University says the university continues to stymie their efforts to uncover what goes on in certain research labs and is going to great lengths and expense to try to block students from accessing information about its military ties.

Students from Demilitarize McGill, which has been battling McGill over access-to-information requests since 2012, say the latest dispute involves access to almost 9,000 email exchanges which they believe could shed light on the university’s involvement in military contracts.

In 2012, first-year women’s studies student Cadence O’Neal made a request through the Access to Information Commission for all communications between McGill’s CFD Laboratory — which “specializes in the development of state-of-the-art methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics,” according to its website — and representatives of companies that have military contracts, such as CAE Inc., Bell Helicopter, Bombardier Inc., Lockheed Martin, Textron and General Atomics.

The request turned up 8,944 email exchanges, which the students are asking the ATI commission to help them obtain — but which they say McGill is trying to withhold on the grounds that they are not legally the property of the university.

“McGill is doing its best to disclose documents pursuant to the law, but the law stipulates that not all documents are accessible,” the university said in a statement to the Montreal Gazette. “McGill alerted private sector sponsors (mostly corporations that fund the research) when such documents were requested and some sponsors objected to disclosure, as is their right … We hope a future hearing in front of the Commission d’accès will resolve these issues.”

The university argues the emails may contain intellectual property or research strategies that the companies do not want to divulge. “It does not mean there is something untoward in the research,” the statement said.

O’Neal, now entering her graduating year, begs to differ.

“I believe these emails will reveal the depth of the collaboration (between CFD and the military),” she said in an interview. “I believe there’s good information in there and that’s why McGill is going to such lengths to block us.”

O’Neal, who will represent herself when she appears before the commission next month, objects to the fact McGill is sparing no expense on the case by hiring high-profile law firm Lavery, which is expected to hand the case to Raymond Doray, a top lawyer in the field of access to information.

And she believes McGill’s contention that it doesn’t legally “hold” the emails is yet another ruse to delay the release of the documents and to roadblock students such as herself, hoping they’ll lose interest as the cases keep dragging on.

Students and university officials have been at odds over the issue of access to information and research with military ties for several years. Currently, McGill has no real policy or guidelines governing research for the military, but Demilitarize McGill has outlined all sorts of research on campus which it claims involves military contracts.

The Students’ Society of McGill University adopted a motion in 2013 calling on McGill to “create and enforce a policy of allowing no future research on weapons, surveillance technologies with military applications … or any other project designed to facilitate the use of force.”

McGill’s Regulation on the Conduct of Research only says that research should be done “to increase knowledge in ways that do not harm but which benefit society.”

Far from being general research that unintentionally ends up in the hands of the military, O’Neal says there is “quite a lot” of military research being conducted on McGill’s campus and it is very “applied” research. In the case of CFD, O’Neal said the lab clearly is working on technology for “a specific model of attack drones” which is not applicable to commercial airlines. Lab director and McGill professor Wagdi Habashi did not reply to an email query from the Montreal Gazette about CFD’s research.

In 2013, McGill filed a motion with the Access to Information Commission to stop a barrage of information requests that officials said had become abusive and hindered university operations. The motion sought to disregard requests already made as well as future requests, saying the university had jumped to 170 requests in 2012 from 37 in 2011.

McGill reached a mediated settlement with the students on their previous requests but was prohibited from barring future requests. The students agreed to reduce the number of their requests, and to revise some of the requests that remained.

However, three students challenged the information they were provided in response to the reformulated requests, saying it was heavily redacted.

But the students don’t always get it right, according to McGill computer science professor Derek Ruths, who says he and his lab, Network Dynamics, have been unfairly targeted by Demilitarize McGill.

Demilitarize McGill has a whole treatise on his lab, saying he is “collaborating with military, police and intelligence agencies to develop tools for surveilling social media” and that his work can lead to “defeating insurgencies.”

O’Neal said his work has received grants from Public Safety Canada, which is affiliated with the RCMP and CSIS, for his surveillance technology. Ruths said in an interview that his social media data mining research is of interest to Public Safety Canada as a tool to help with disaster response.

“I’m absolutely not working with police or governments to address social movements,” he said. “I’m definitely not working to suppress social movements. I’m deeply opposed to that and I believe social media is an important tool to help social movements.

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